Smile through hard times may not be the best advice

The old saying “Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.” may have an essence of truth to it but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
There’s nothing wrong with smiling when one feels genuinely happy. However, smiling all the time even through hardships might not be the best strategy says researchers of University of Hong Kong.
When people force themselves to smile because they hope to feel better or they do it just to hide their negative emotions, this strategy may backfire, researchers said.
“Most commonly, people smile when they are happy, because smiling reflects happiness,” said Anirban Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor of marketing at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“However, people also smile when they are unhappy, to mask negative emotion or to try and become happy. In the latter scenario, people may associate the acts of smiling not only with feeling happy, but also with feeling unhappy” he added.
The researchers have concluded that those people who smile when they are not happy feel worse when they smiled frequently and people who often smiled when they were happy felt better when they smiled frequently.
“More generally, we think that making people who are feeling bad smile could backfire and make them feel worse, because they may interpret smiling as trying to become happy,” Mukhopadhyay said.
“Smiling frequently would remind them of being not happy,” he said, advising that the best strategy in such cases may in fact be not to smile until the negative emotion that is making a person feel bad gets resolved.
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.